


honk honk vroom vroom

by dirtybinary



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Crack, M/M, Multi, No Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Reckless Driving, uber driver au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 14:21:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7056118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam meets the Uber driver from hell. Apparently, the Winter Soldier has a new day job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	honk honk vroom vroom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sonatine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonatine/gifts).



"I didn’t call for an Uber,” says Sam.

He called for a lot of other things. Help, for instance. Because, one, there happens to be an angry pterodactyl-like thing gliding across the sky above Brooklyn, knocking off the top of every building it passes, and two, he left his own wings at home. All he wanted was to go to the store in his sweatpants and buy some yogurt for his superhero boyfriend, but apparently being a normal guy just isn’t an option any more.

Also, judging by the flurry of texts lighting up his phone, said superhero boyfriend is no longer curled in a large, sleepy ball of happy on their bed, but has commenced jumping off things and slinging his Frisbee around. Hopefully with something thrown on over his Falcon underpants.

Sam sighs. This is not shaping up to be a great Sunday morning.

“Huh,” says the driver of the mysterious Uber. It’s a big black SUV with mean-looking headlights and a bumper that could probably survive a head-on collision with a small plane. “Looks like you need one.”

There’s no arguing with that. Sam looks the driver up and down. He’s a big guy wearing at least two or three mismatched sweaters, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes—so, not exactly confidence-inspiring—but Sam’s an actual card-carrying Avenger now. He’s sure he can take the driver if the man tries to disappear him in a dark alley. Maybe. More or less.

And Steve _really_ needs backup.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, reaching for the door handle. A throng of fleeing passers-by jostles him off the sidewalk and into the car. “Fine.”

 

#

 

Five minutes later, he’s clinging like a barnacle to the headrest of the passenger seat, yelling into his phone. “Steve, no, look, I don’t think I can help this time. This asshole driver’s trying to kill me. He just ran four red lights in a row and—”

The driver honks, causing four other cars and a cement truck to screech back at them, and then mounts the sidewalk in front of the subway station. Pedestrians scatter in a cloudburst of profanities. Most of them seem more outraged by the bad driving than the actual dinosaur circling overhead. “And now, uh, now I think he’s trying to drive down the subway steps. It was nice knowing you, Steve. Tell my mom I love her.”

The car crashes back onto the road, jolting the phone out of Sam’s hand. He resumes his efforts at becoming one with the passenger seat. “Look, buddy,” he says. “I get that there’s a pterodactyl in the sky and all. I kinda, you know, need to stay in one piece until I get close enough to fight it.”

“So _that’s_ what you’re in a hurry to do,” says the driver. The car speeds past an orange light and ploughs through an intersection at a trajectory not altogether congruent with Newtonian physics. “I thought it was your family reunion.”

“Excuse me?”

A horrible thought occurs to Sam. Stricken, he cranes round the headrest to get a good look at the driver’s face beneath the rim of his cap. Brown stubble, cleft chin, blue-grey eyes, an unpardonably pouty mouth—“Oh, fuck.”

He is definitely not walking away from this. He just got into a car with the Winter Soldier, last seen ripping off his wing and throwing him out of the sky to spiral toward uncertain doom. “What about it?” asks the driver. In the rearview mirror, his stare is belligerent and challenging. “Wanna get out and walk?”

Sam looks around for his phone, which has rolled across the floor to the far side of the back seat. He makes a tentative grab for it, but then the driver takes a hard right, and Sam has to fling both arms back round the passenger seat as the car veers across four lanes. “Don’t,” says the Soldier, “tell Rogers.”

“Man,” says Sam, “I think he’s gonna find out when he sees this car wrapped around a streetlight with bits of us in it.”

A thin line appears across the Soldier’s brow, as if he’s thinking it over. Then, like a miracle, the car slows. Just a little. They might actually be doing less than a hundred now; Sam can’t bear to look. He stares at the driver instead. He’s never actually _heard_ Barnes speak, or seen him do anything besides, well, murdering. He’s cut his hair, or at least washed and trimmed it a little, which is half of the reason Sam didn’t recognise him at first. The other half is the shifty expression on his face.

“Is this an abduction?” asks Sam at last, for lack of anything else to say. He never even got his fucking yogurt.

The pouty boyband mouth lifts into a sneer. In person, the Winter Soldier is every bit as model-pretty as he was in Steve’s sepia photographs. “Who’d abduct you?” asks Barnes. “Look in the box.”

There’s a large packing box in the front seat. Sam takes a deep breath, then disengages one hand long enough to lean forward and open it. Nestled within, one on top of the other, are his jetpack and a spare parachute. “My God,” says Sam. He makes another movement towards his phone, but gives up when his face smacks into the window. “I’m filing a complaint with Uber.”

The car skids into a side street. Sam careens all the way to the other side of the back seat, and his phone disappears into the abyss between upholstery and door. “Later,” says Barnes. He points up. “Backup required.”

Sam realises they are now almost directly under the pterodactyl’s belly. People are shrieking, running past the car in the opposite direction. Twenty storeys above, a blond figure in a dark blue suit bounces off one building and hurtles into the next. Sam swears. “I see that.”

The car screeches to a halt, and he faceplants into the headrest. “Other agents considered and dismissed,” says Barnes, still sounding as calm as a news anchor. “Romanoff’s location unknown. Banner-level intervention unwarranted. Stark’s personality a natural irritant. You will have to suffice.”

He pulls a revolver from the glove compartment and hands it over, as matter-of-fact as if he were offering Sam a mint. Nat’s done the same thing on at least two occasions. “Uh,” says Sam, reaching automatically for the weapon. Out of habit, he glances at the meter, but it’s not running. “Thanks?”

Barnes jabs his finger at the blond figure, now dangling from one of the pterodactyl’s talons. “Goodbye, Wilson,” he says pointedly.

Sam takes the hint. He grabs his stuff and gets out of the car, already shrugging into the straps of his jetpack.

 

#

 

Scarcely a week after they send the pterodactyl back to whichever horrible alternate history from which it came, Sam emerges from the Tower to find a familiar black car idling in the parking lot. “Oh, hell, no,” he says aloud.

The tires of the car are a lot muddier, and there are a few new scratches along the bottom of the doors. He looks around, incredulous, for CCTVs or security guards—he spots at least two of each in the immediate vicinity—and marches over to the passenger-side window, already sliding down to greet him. “I guess,” he says, “there’s no use asking what you’re doing here?”

Barnes, too, has a swollen eye and few extra scratches along his jaw. There might be more wounds elsewhere, but his face is the only exposed part of him. If his healing factor is anything like Steve’s, he probably came straight here from murdering. It’s not a reassuring thought. “No,” he says.

It’s a perfect summary of Sam’s feelings about him. “So this _is_ an abduction?”

Something sharp and knifelike glints in Barnes’s eyes. Sam has seen that exact look on Steve before, albeit in a completely different context. His stomach does a weird flippy thing, as if he’s just furled his wings and plummeted. “I don’t see you running and screaming,” says Barnes.

Sam seriously considers doing both, but Barnes would never let him live it down. “The hell do you want now? Is Steve okay?”

“Not Steve,” says Barnes. “Don’t—”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t tell him,” says Sam. “I’m not making any promises, man. I don’t like keeping secrets. Especially from my boyfriend. What is it then?”

“Me,” says Barnes.

He grimaces, or snarls, or smiles with a lot of teeth—with him, it’s kind of hard to tell the difference—and pulls out a phone. A few taps with a gloved forefinger, and a street map of Manhattan comes up on the screen. One of the buildings, a disused office by the looks of it, is marked off with a red X. “Hydra,” says Barnes. He looks a little queasy.

“Fuck,” says Sam.

“Yeah,” says Barnes. Then he adds, “I designed the app myself. It syncs up to a bunch of heat and motion sensors, and alerts me whenever someone enters or leaves one of these buildings.”

“Fuck,” says Sam again. This is some Stark-level shit.

Barnes smiles, this time with no teeth at all. “Yeah.”

Turning him down and walking away doesn’t really feel like much of an option after that. Nat is still off the grid, Tony and Pepper are out of town, and Steve is at his art class. It’s an unspoken Avengers rule that nobody disturbs Steve while he’s painting—his life is tragic enough as it is. There’s no one else Sam can call, even if Barnes would put up with them.

Sam glances around the parking lot—mostly vacant—and comes to a probably ill-advised decision, the same sort that got him running around with superheroes in the first place. “Fine,” he says. “Give me five minutes. I gotta grab my gear.”

He steps away from the car. “Meter’s running,” Barnes calls, sounding more cheerful than Sam has ever heard him. Sam gives him the finger without looking back.

 

#

 

It’s fully dark by the time they get to the Hydra hideout. As promised, the building isn’t anywhere as deserted as it looks, and the mission is nasty work. There’s some kind of science-lab-slash-dungeon in the basement that Barnes seems to know suspiciously well, but he won’t let Sam go in with him, not even to watch his six. “Then what the hell did you bring me here for?” Sam demands, stepping across the pile of bodies at the entrance to the stairwell. He’s itching to hit something.

“To fly around and look pretty,” says Barnes. He’s already one floor down, taking the stairs three at a time. A knife shimmers from one of his hands to the other and back, quick as an acrobat. “I mean it, birdie. Don’t follow me.”

Sam wants to protest, but he has the feeling that Barnes could have easily taken this lot out by himself; he just wanted some company while he did it. Especially with whatever’s in the basement. Sam doesn’t like to imagine what could be so awful as to frighten the Winter Soldier, but he went through the Kiev file at Steve’s side, and he’s got a fair few ideas, all of them much more vivid than he would prefer.

“Sure, grumpy cat,” he says. “Scream if you need me.”

He spends the rest of the mission circling over the office building, keeping up a steady stream of insults and complaints over their comms system. He is duly gratified when Barnes stomps out the front door half an hour later looking unharmed and unruffled, and a good bit more irritable than usual.

 

#

 

After that, Sam makes up his mind to tell Steve about Barnes as soon as he can. But he gets home after the mission to find the apartment dark and empty, and there’s a voicemail on his phone from Steve, saying he’s been called away to Hollywood with Clint and Wanda to fight—Sam has to replay the voicemail three times to be sure of what he’s hearing—a rock star whose voice has mind-control powers. “I guess it takes all sorts to make a world,” says Steve in his best sassy grandpa voice, just before he hangs up. Sam misses him already.

So he doesn’t get to tell Steve about Barnes—he _really_ doesn’t want to have this conversation over Skype—and then to compound matters, he comes out of the VA two days later to find the black car idling by the entrance. For a split second he’s stuck in a very interesting place between two contradictory urges: one to demand what the hell Barnes thinks he’s doing, going near his vets; and the other to invite him to join every single support group they have, because God knows this man is pretty much the poster boy of PTSD. In the end, all he does is walk up to the car and get in on the passenger side. “This is my fucking workplace,” he says.

For once, Barnes doesn’t have a snappy answer. His shifty expression has returned. “Yeah.”

He doesn’t look particularly sinister today, so Sam lets it slide. He looks around the car for clues as to what’s wrong this time, but finds none. No gear, no streaks of dried blood, no visible weapons—but then, Barnes hardly needs a gun to ruin someone’s day. “What’s up?” asks Sam. “Any Hydra cells piss you off lately?”

Barnes drums his metal fingers on the wheel without looking at Sam. It makes a noise like a fender bender. “Nope.”

The car doesn’t move. Sam stares at him, baffled. Without the customary glower, he doesn’t even look all that dangerous, just sleepy and sort of awkward. Like a stubbly marshmallow. Like one of those chubby cats that lie in the sun all day looking harmless, and then claw your eyes out when you try to pet them. There are few things in the world as lethal as a false assumption. “Okay? So this is really an abduction?”

“Nope,” says Barnes again.

One of Sam’s vets is crossing the parking lot. She waves at Sam, who briefly considers mouthing _save me_ , thinks better of it, and waves back. So does Barnes. The vet raises her brows, makes a kissy face, and disappears inside the building. Sam groans.

“So,” says Barnes after a minute, “do you have anywhere to go?”

“Uh,” says Sam. “I was supposed to go to my nephew’s birthday party down in Queens. If I don’t get there by six my sister’s gonna be pissed.”

Barnes checks his watch, then the Hydra tracker app on his phone. Apparently it also functions as a GPS. “Roadworks all over the damn place,” he says. “But it shouldn’t be a problem.”

He puts the car in drive, and pulls out of the parking lot. Sam’s so flummoxed that they’re halfway down the street by the time he manages to speak. “Are you _driving_ me there?”

“No, I’m taking out the trash,” says Barnes. He has a straight face worthy of Steve, the bastard.

“Barnes,” says Sam. Out of sheer muscle memory, he reaches for the grab handle above the door and braces himself, but Barnes is actually a pretty sedate driver when nobody’s life or death is at stake. That might be a bit of an understatement. Sam is fairly sure that’s an 18-wheeler overtaking them in the next lane. “What the hell is this about?”

The fender bender noise occurs again. If Barnes frowns any harder, his brow is going to catch fire from all that friction. “You don’t have a car any more.”

“Yeah, because the last time I drove, _someone_ jumped on the fucking roof and punched through the fucking windshield and I still get cold sweats when I get behind the fucking wheel—” Sam stops. He’s starting to see where all this is going. “Is that why you—”

“Yes, Wilson,” says Barnes, with an air of extreme forebearance. The furrow in his brows has deepened even more. “That is why I am driving you to your nephew’s birthday party. Amends, or whatever. Do you need to pick up a present? Cake?”

Sam blinks. He doubts he has ever been so blind-sided in his life, not even when Captain America presented him with a bouquet of honest-to-God roses and a hand-painted parakeet balloon after a mission and asked him out on a date, as if they weren’t already spending all their time together. He wishes, desperately, that he does have some cake, if only so he can rub Barnes’s face in it.

“You know,” he says, when he recovers the power of speech, “I’m really gonna have to tell Steve about this. I can’t hide his ex from hell from him.”

“Man,” says Barnes. “I thought you’d have told him by now. I’ve been prepared to be flagged down by Big Blond Sad all week. Yeah, you’d better, or he’ll give you that kicked puppy look and then you’ll have to live with the all-consuming guilt for the rest of your life.”

“Oh, God,” says Sam involuntarily. “The Jaw of Righteous Rage—”

“The Shoulder Heave of Disappointment!”

They exchange looks of horror, and Sam learns two things in quick succession: not only is Barnes capable of laughing, or at least sniggering, he, Sam, is also capable of laughing at something Barnes said. It must be the apocalypse or something.

Actually, there are three things. Barnes is kind of cute when he laughs.

“Yeah,” says Sam, looking around for flying pigs and locust swarms. Nothing. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll tell him as soon as he gets back from fighting evil rock stars in Hollywood.”

Barnes bursts into a most un-fearsome fit of giggles and nearly runs a red light.

 

#

 

It’s 3:37 the next morning when Sam wakes, thinking he’s heard the creak of the front door, and pads out to the living room to find Steve leaning over to rummage in the fridge. He pauses in the doorway to savour the view. “Hello, you.”

“Oh, hey.” Steve straightens with a bottle of apple juice in one hand and a pack of frozen ham in the other. He’s in sweatpants and one of his not-so-tight t-shirts, and his hair is pleasantly ruffled in a way that suggests he’s either showered on the quinjet or jumped out of it without his helmet on. Probably both. “Sorry I woke you. We need to do something about the goddamn door.”

They say that all the time, but they’ve lived here a little over a year now and Sam doubts they’ll ever get round to it. It’s just nice to have a built-in alarm system. He goes over and stretches up to kiss Steve, who obligingly wraps both grocery-laden arms around him and squishes. “How was Hollywood?”

“Sweaty,” says Steve. He lets go before he actually crushes Sam’s shoulderblades, and pops the ham into the microwave. “How was Mike’s party?”

“Screechy,” says Sam. He pulls up a stool and sits down at the kitchen counter to watch Steve. “Twelve kids in a tiny yard.”

“Ah,” says Steve.

He rummages in the fridge some more and comes up with a head of lettuce. From experience, Sam knows he’s going to put the entire thing in his twelve sandwiches. It’s not even that Steve likes veggies. He just feels morally obliged to eat them. “Actually,” says Sam, handing him the bread, “there’s something I gotta tell you. You know the Uber driver who fetched my wings and drove me to the pterodactyl the other time?”

He cannot believe that is a sentence that just came out of his mouth, but apparently this is his life now. “The one who drove like a tank?” asks Steve.

“Yeah,” says Sam. He treads carefully, like a sparrow between the sidewalk cracks. “Well. Turns out your other boyfriend’s got a day job now.”

The microwave dings. Neither of them look at it. Steve’s hands go still over the sink. “Bucky?”

“You got another other boyfriend?” asks Sam. “Barnes. I’ve seen him around a couple of times since. He, uh, drove me to Mike’s party today.”

He explains, briefly, about the car and the Hydra cell and the repeated non-abductions. Steve’s eyes grow to the size of egg yolks, narrow, and widen again. “He’s appointed himself your chauffeur?”

“I guess?” says Sam. Weirder things have happened. “He’s a shit driver though, I gotta say. You okay, Steve-o?”

Steve is grinning. It’s just a small twitch of the lips—not his usual date-night smile, or even his beating-up-bad-guys smirk, more of a prototype of the smile Sam saw once before in a museum and never again. “Can’t say I’m surprised,” he says. “I always knew he’d turn up.”

“That wasn’t what you said when we were chasing cold trails all over Europe,” says Sam.

Steve winces. “Yeah, well. That was two years ago. He’s always been stubborn.”

If even Steve thinks everything is going to be okay, then maybe it will be. Sam lets out a breath, and goes to get the ham out of the microwave. “And weird?”

“And weird,” Steve agrees. “Make him parallel park next time. He never learnt.”

Sam smiles, too. He’s getting a little hungry himself. He was prepared for the long separations and the constant threat of death when he started dating a superhero, but he didn’t expect to wind up having random suppers at four in the morning quite so often. He’s not complaining, though. “At first he said not to tell you,” he says. “But I think he’s coming round to it. Maybe next time I’ll get him to hang around long enough to say hi.”

“Ony if he wants to,” says Steve. He stares at the lettuce in his hands, scrunches up his face into a mask of tragic determination, and starts tearing off leaves to put in his sandwiches. “By the way, Sam—you two, uh, get on okay?”

Sam ponders this. “You know,” he says, stealing a bite of ham, “he’s actually pretty nice in a dorky way. When he’s not busy murdering.”

 

#

 

A week passes with no sign of the black car, though Sam keeps his eyes peeled as he commutes between his apartment, the Tower and the VA. He wonders if Barnes got scared off, or if he’s playing hard to get, or if he’s been captured or something and Sam will have to borrow the shield and go save the damsel in distress. He really hopes not. He’s still covered with bruises from air-sparring with Rhodey the other day.

He’s not worried. Most definitely not.

And then he walks out of the VA building on a Friday evening, and the security guard waves to him from the gatehouse. “Friend waiting outside for you, Wilson,” the guard calls. “Told him he could wait in here, but he said he’d better not.”

Sam bites back a smile. Not relieved, no. Certainly not pleased. “Yeah, he’s a strange one. Thanks.”

He jogs out of the compound and finds Barnes idling at the side of the road, blinkers on. This time he gets in without asking questions, chucking his laptop case in the back seat. “Thought I’d lost my chauffeur for a bit.”

Barnes sticks out his lower lip. Sam has learnt that this is his Thinking Face. “You didn’t like it when I came in last time.”

“Nah, I was just taken aback,” says Sam. He studies his driver for a moment. Barnes looks different—the ever-present hoodie is gone, replaced by a navy blue button-up shirt not unlike the ones Steve wears when he doesn’t feel like busting through the sleeves of yet another innocent t-shirt. He’s even shed the baseball cap. And—“Wait, you _shaved_?”

“No,” says Barnes, rolling his eyes. “My stubble fell off at the sight of you.”

Sam pulls the worst face he can make. If Barnes is going to behave like a third-grader, then by God, Sam’s gonna out-awful him. “Should I take this as a sign that you’re ready to stop skulking about and go see Steve?”

If possible, the fat lower lip juts out even farther. Barnes seems ten years younger without the stubble, which is to say he currently looks like a teenager. “I’m not skulking.”

“Sure,” says Sam. “Whatever. I told him you’d taken up cab driving and he grinned so hard his face almost cracked.”

He watches with interest as Barnes attempts to glower even harder. His mouth wobbles, and ends up twisting itself into something resembling a smile. “Jackass,” he says.

“Can’t argue with that,” says Sam. An idea pops into his head, one of his more brilliant ones. “You gonna drive me or what? I’m meeting Steve in town for dinner.”

Barnes tries to glower some more, gives up, and shifts the car into drive. “Date night?”

“I guess,” says Sam. “As long as no moustache-twirling villain tries to poison the food or drop a chandelier on our heads this time. You wanna join us? It sounds just like your thing.”

“What,” says Barnes. “As a bodyguard?”

“Something like that,” says Sam. “Or you could just help me kick Steve in the shins when he tries to steal the fries off my plate. I’m just a normal guy, man. I can’t take him all by myself.”

Barnes sighs, looking put out. “I guess you’ll want a lift home after.”

“Yeah, that too.”

“Okay, okay,” says Barnes. His mouth makes such a deep inverted-U that Sam nearly bursts out laughing. “A night out with Mr. Right and Mr. Always Right. You'd better text ahead and let Steve know I’m coming. Don’t want him to faint into the appetizers.”

“Wouldn’t that be a sight,” says Sam, smiling. Nailed it.

**Author's Note:**

> [dirtybinary](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com) on tumblr | check out my [original novel](http://valeaida.tumblr.com/post/149576789996/an-elegy-info-post) for more of the gay arch-enemies aesthetic

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] honk honk vroom vroom](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9398891) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)




End file.
